The Historical GIS Research Network

Home What is HGIS? HGIS 2008 Other Conferences Training Resources Bibliography European HGIS Initiative Humanities GIS Credits

This list is not exhaustive but we aim to include all of the major historical GIS websites plus additional relevant websites. Please notify Ian Gregory of any sites that you feel should be added or links that no longer work.

Resources are classed under:
National Historical GISs
Other online Historical GIS projects
Historical map servers and other data sources
Organisations
Software
Other useful sites

National Historical GISs:

The Great Britain Historical GIS: http://www.gbhgis.org
The US National Historical GIS: http://www.nhgis.org
The China Historical GIS: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis
Chinese Civilization in Time and Space: http://ccts.ascc.net
Taiwan History and Culture in Time and Space: http://thcts.ascc.net
The Belgian Historical GIS: http://www.flwi.ugent.be/hisgis
The Historical GIS for the Netherlands: http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/nl/geschiedenis/projecten
Historical GIS Germany: http://www.hgis-germany.de
Russian Historical GIS: http://www.ihst.ru/personal/imerz/bound/bounds.htm
Back to top

Other online Historical GIS projects:

Bam 3D: www.bam3d.org. A virtual representation of the citadel of Bam in Iran which was destroyed by an earthquake in 2003

A Tale of Two Cities: Community Differentiation in 19th Century America: http://www.socsci.flinders.edu.au/amst/TaleofTwoCities/. A project that is comparing two small cities in the US in the second half of the nineteenth century using individual-level data.

5th Street Cemetery Necrogeographical Study: http://www.lewiston.k12.id.us/staff/sbranting/5thcem/5thcem.htm. An extensive school-based project looking at a cemetery in Idaho.

Mapping Medieval Townscapes: A digital atlas of the new towns of Edward I: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/specColl/atlas_ahrb_2005/index.cfm. The project that built this atlas is described at: http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping. These sites both contain information about medieval townscapes in England and Wales.

The Gough Map Online: http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/gough_map/. The Gough Map is a medieval map of the British Isles. This project has created an online version of it.

Victorian Railways: An Introduction to Historical GIS: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/rail/intro_hist_gis.htm. A resource that uses GIS to teach history to undergraduates based on the impact of the growth of the railways on Victorian England and Wales.

Vision of Britain through Time: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk. Information from the Great Britain Historical GIS and elsewhere put online.

Staffordshire Past Track: http://www.staffspasttrack.org.uk. A large GIS database of images of Staffordshire's past.

The International Dunhuang Project: http://idp.bl.uk. A large project based at the British Library concerned with locating artefacts from the Silk Road in time and space.

Holocaust Geography: http://geosites.evans.txstate.edu/~holocaust-geography. A site based at the University of Texas concerned with using GIS to explore the history of the Holocaust.

The Valley of the Shadow Project: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu. A large site that uses GIS to structure and represent data about two US counties around the time of the Civil War.

The Salem Witchcraft Trials: http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft. A large site that uses GIS to help structure and present data about the village of Salem, Mass. around the time of the famous witchcraft trials.

Social Explorer: http://www.socialexplorer.org. A large amount of data from the US National Historical GIS put online through an easy-to-use interface.

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries: http://www.newberry.org/ahcbp. A major site recording changes to US county boundaries over time. The site includes downloads of some of its material. Hosted by the Newberry Library, Chicago.

North American Religion Atlas: http://www.religionatlas.org. A large amount of data on US religion available through a map-based interface.

West Virginia University Laboratory of Geographical Information Science: http://ark.geo.wvu.edu/projects.html. A number of projects particularly concerned with using virtual reality techniques in historical GIS.

Historical map servers and other data sources:

IEG Map Server: http://www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de. Freely available maps primarily of Germany and Central Europe.
The David Rumsey Map Collection: http://www.davidrumsey.com. Large numbers of scans from historical maps and gazetteers
The ECAI Clearinghouse: http://ecaimaps.berkeley.edu/clearinghouse. A variety of historical datasets, many freely available.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service, History: http://www.ahds.ac.uk/history. The AHDS provides a large amount of historical data to the UK Higher Education Community. Some of it is in GIS form.
Historic Digimap, UKBorders and other resources: http://www.edina.ac.uk/maps. Edina provides a large amount of data to subscribed users, particularly from UK Higher Education. Historic Digimap contains scans of historical maps of the UK, UKBorders holds historical and contemporary boundary data for the UK.
The Geography Network: http://www.geographynetwork.com.Most of the data here is modern.
Global Landcover Facility: http://www.landcover.org/index.shtml. A large amount of satellite imagery. Older data may be free or cheap.
The Alexandria Digital Library: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu. A distributed digital library containing information that may be of interest to historians.
Back to top

Organisations:

The Social Science History Association: http://www.ssha.org
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative: http://www.ecai.org
The Association of American Geographers: http://www.aag.org
The Association for History and Computing: http://grid.let.rug.nl/ahc
The European Social Science History Conference: http://www.iisg.nl/esshc
The Royal Geographical Society with the IBG : http://www.rgs.org
Back to top

Software:
Note: Mainstream commercial software is not listed here

TimeMap: http://www.timemap.net. A free GIS data viewer specifically written for people with temporal data.
ESRI’s ArcExplorer: http://www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/index.html. A free download of a GIS data viewer.
GenMap: http://www.archersoftware.co.uk/index.htm. A very cheap GIS data viewer written for historical and genealogical purposes.
GeoDa: https://www.geoda.uiuc.edu. A useful, free piece of software written to allow spatial analysis with GIS data.
MapServer: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu. An open sources development environment for putting GIS data on the web.
GeoTools: http://geotools.codehaus.org. A Java library for manipulating GIS data.
Back to top

Other useful sites:

GIS for History: http://www.gisforhistory.org. A website that uses GIS to teach history. Aimed specifically at American schools.
Colorbrewer: http://www.colorbrewer.org. An excellent website that provides effective choices of shading for thematic maps.
The Centre for Spatially Integrated Social Science: http://www.csiss.org. A useful portal for resources related to applying GIS to the social sciences.
The Open GIS Consortium: http://www.opengeospatial.org. A not-for-profit organisation concerned with setting standards for GIS.
The Data Documentation Initiative: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI. Concerned with establishing standards for documenting social science datasets.
List of GIS resources from Edinburgh University: http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/gishome.html
List of GIS resources from the Harvard School of Design: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/users/pbcote/GIS/web_resources.html